More Dalrymple, via NER, from an interview in the American Spectator:   

Many young people now end a discussion with the supposedly definitive and unanswerable statement that such is their opinion, and their opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s. The fact is that our opinion on an infinitely large number of questions is not worth having, because everyone is infinitely ignorant. My opinion of the parasitic diseases of polar bears is not worth having for the simple reason that I know nothing about them, though I have a right to an opinion in the sense that I should not receive a knock on the door from the secret police if I express such a worthless opinion. The right to an opinion is often confused (no doubt for reasons of misplaced democratic sentiment) for the validity of an opinion, just as the validity of an argument is often mistaken for the truth of a conclusion.

The “democratic sentiment” behind this flattening of truth claims is sometimes made explicit, as when Frederique Apffel Marglin railed against smallpox vaccination – and “science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge” – while romanticising the Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox, as an equally valid “narrative”. Or when Madeleine Bunting sprang to the defence of Islamic theology and confidently informed her readers, “We are profoundly irrational and… rationality is a social construction.” Bunting is, it seems, happy to conflate knowledge and fairness, and can be counted on to do so on a fairly regular basis. Unfortunately, such pretensions are not uncommon and are typically expressed as a belief that no one epistemological position – at least not a “Western” one – can be “privileged” above another, especially one deemed more colourful and “authentic”, supposedly in the interests of resisting “cultural imperialism.” This kind of epistemic egalitarianism may seem quite thrilling to a subset of leftist ideologues, particularly those who resent the functional pre-eminence of Western societies and who feel it is somehow wrong that so-called “Western ways of knowing” are also pre-eminent in their accuracy and effectiveness.

As I wrote in one of my first posts,

Cultural equivalence underlies the current fashion for religious protectionism, whereby reason and scientific methodology are depicted as equivalent to faith and merely a matter of lifestyle choice, as if logical enquiry had no attributes that set it apart from religious ideology and a priori belief. But to equate these very different phenomena requires one to flatten values and empty the mind in the ostensible interest of ‘fairness’ – perhaps to spare the blushes of the less capable among us.

In one recent discussion I was told that, “science is based on assumptions; an assumption is essentially a belief, so science is based on belief.” But the scientific method is based on the testing of formal hypotheses, as opposed to beliefs, which are not the same thing at all. Strictly speaking, a scientific hypothesis must be self-consistent, must explain existing observations and must predict new ones. These formal obligations and restraints are not comparable with the unquestioning acceptance of unverifiable assumptions as a priori truth, which is the signature of religion. There is a profound epistemological difference.

The scientific method is one of the best practical lessons in intellectual humility and one can only wish a few clerics – and a few Guardian columnists – would avail themselves of this tool. As the mathematician Ian Stewart pointed out: “Science is the best defence against believing what we want to.” And the willingness to defer to evidence – as opposed to one’s own wishes and beliefs – is the antithesis of fundamentalism…

Curiously, the person who so adamantly equated science with belief also maintained that the theories of relativity (the details of which escaped him) are “beliefs” and thus in no way “vulnerable to the scientific method.” When I drew attention to evidence to the contrary, the subject was swiftly changed and other things were asserted with even greater adamance. This is one of the incidental rewards of cultural equivalence; it blunts the critical senses and levels all values until people who know nothing about any given subject feel entitled to assert things about that subject with great confidence and a whiff of righteousness. One can, as Ian Stewart warned, believe whatever one wants.

Via Stephen Hicks, I discovered this 1999 essay by Theodore Dalrymple, on poverty and squalor. A discussion point, perhaps.

Notoriously, the infant mortality rate is twice as high in the lowest social class as in the highest. But the infant mortality rate of illegitimate births is twice that of legitimate ones, and the illegitimacy rate rises steeply as you descend the social scale: so the decline of marriage almost to the vanishing point in the lowest social class might well be responsible for most of its excess infant mortality. It is a way of life, not poverty per se, that kills. The commonest cause of death between the ages of 15 and 44 is now suicide, which has increased most precipitously precisely among those who live in the underclass world of temporary step-parenthood and of conduct unrestrained either by law or convention.

Just as it is easier to recognise ill health in someone you haven’t seen for some time rather than in someone you meet daily, so a visitor coming into a society from elsewhere often can see its character more clearly than those who live in it. Every few months, doctors from countries like the Philippines and India arrive fresh from the airport to work for a year’s stint at my hospital. It is fascinating to observe their evolving response to British squalor. At the start, they are uniformly enthusiastic about the care that we unsparingly and unhesitatingly give to everyone, regardless of economic status… There seems to be a public agency to deal with every conceivable problem. For a couple of weeks, they think this all represents the acme of civilisation, especially when they recall the horrors at home. Poverty – as they know it – has been abolished…

Case after case causes them to revise their initial favorable opinion. Before long, they have had experience of hundreds, and their view has changed entirely… In the welfare state, mere survival is not the achievement that it is, say, in the cities of Africa, and therefore it cannot confer the self-respect that is the precondition of self-improvement… By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidised apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They come to realise that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial egotism.

The whole thing.

It seems to me that whatever behaviour gets rewarded will tend to be repeated, and if a demoralised, parasitic and antisocial outlook is spared its natural fate, it will persist and, most likely, become more objectionable and entrenched. This is one of the fundamental difficulties of Socialism and material egalitarianism. How does one offer a hand-up to those in need and with a desire to become (gasp) bourgeois, while not rewarding self-inflicted woe and reinforcing the social ills that follow? 

Madsen Pirie outlines the problems of proportional representation.   

Proportional representation… brings in the politics of what used to be called the smoke-filled room, of the deals struck in private between the political bosses. The first-past-the-post system may often bring to power parties with less than 50 percent of the popular vote. What it does not do is to give excessive power to very small parties. One has only to look at the disproportionate influence of the extreme orthodox parties in Israel. With only 2 or 3 seats they have exercised a major influence because their votes were needed to build coalitions. It’s possible to have a 10 percent shift in opinion in Scandinavia, and see only some junior agriculture minister swapped for someone from another party.

A democracy should enable people to change their government. It is more about throwing out who they don’t want than about electing the most popular. Proportional representation makes change difficult. Elections tend to bring small adjustments in the balance between the parties, and to result in coalitions of slightly different composition. There are times when a break from the status quo is needed. It happened in Britain in 1945 and in 1979, but it is doubtful that either would have happened under proportional representation.

With Scientology in the news again, now seems a good time to revisit this 1983 Penthouse interview with the estranged son of L Ron Hubbard, the late Ronald Edward DeWolf.

In 1950 L Ron Hubbard opened a Dianetics clinic, where the hopeful and newly converted could come, for a fee, and their ills – from loneliness to cancer – would be cured. Dianetics was the new Scientific Revolution and Hubbard was its prophet… Soon the New Jersey authorities and the American Medical Association challenged the veracity of the new faith. L Ron Hubbard met the challenge by fleeing the state (not the last time this was to happen). A frequent memory of Ron Jr. is his father’s packing up shoeboxes with thousands of dollars to move on to greener and safer pastures.

“We attracted quite a few hippies but we tried to stay away from them, because they didn’t have any money.”

More. And. Related: The L Ron Hubbard audio collection.

(h/t, Discarded Lies.)

The Stalinmobile. It’s post-ironic, I think.

Related: Stalin’s actual cars and other personal items. And.